"Show Don't Tell" and non-English-speaking readers

Firstly, let me clarify right off the bat that I don't think "catering to non-English-speakers" is the only benefit of Show, Don't Tell in the context of image pickin' threads... far from it.

But I also don't think it's a trivial one. The vast majority of the world's population does not speak English. (Including much of the country that makes the cute anime images we so love to put in our pages.) We, the minority of the world's population that speaks English, are really the odd ones out here. Where else do you think the questionable grammar permeating the Internet came from in the first place?

For everyone else, they rely on translation apps to translate websites that are written in English. However, these translators don't translate images. There are image-translating apps out there too, but they're more prone to errors, and more time-consuming on the part of the billions of potential readers who don't speak English... whereas finding a "Show, Don't Tell" image would be slightly only more time consuming, if any, and would only be time consuming among the small fraction of existing readers who partake in any given image pickin' thread.

Wikipedia exists in other languages... you could argue that it's because it's about "facts," not fiction, but when you consider how piss-poor its standards of scrutiny are, that's using the term "facts" loosely. That and there's precedent in the education system's literature courses, agree with it or not, for putting analysis of fiction on a comparable level to analysis of facts... why should we shut non-English-speaking countries out of our role in the former?

Don't get me wrong, some tropes will inevitably rely on written dialogue anyway. But for the ones that don't, why not take an extra step or two to make this site just a little more useful to the rest of the world?

I mean...this is an English-language website, my guy...

So? Does that really make easy steps toward making it more accessible to that majority of the world's population that doesn't speak English a bad thing?

No, but I'm just not really sure what it is you're expecting. We can't just get rid of all images with English text in them.

Most of the pages' content (literally everything besides the picture) is in text form, so even if the picture would convey what the trope is about just by its visuals alone, that wouldn't be enough to make the page more accessible to non-English speakers.

Also, page description often contains details about the trope that are not or could not be illustrated in a single image. The pic almost always has a supporting role of the trope description.

TV Tropes is an English website and speaking as a non-native speaker of the language, the only way it could be made more accessible to non-English speakers is by translating the text (which is around 95% of its content if not more) to the mother tongues of the respective audiences.

The automatic translation technology that is currently in use is not sophisticated enough to translate the site's content properly. At least from English to Russian it comes up with a text with vaguely similar meaning to the original at best, and with complete gibberish at worst.

Edited by Millership on Jun 16th 2019 at 2:55:16 PM

To address a point: we generally discourage images that rely on text to convey the trope in question because of Show, Don't Tell, although sometimes it cannot be avoided. However, we have no policy about omitting text because it's unfriendly to non-English readers. That's ridiculous.

As noted, you can't just rely on auto-translate for an article to make sense. Instead, if you want to provide an accurate translation, you are welcome to join in the translations project and create localized versions of articles, with appropriate images.

If you feel that an article has an image that violates the spirit of Show, Don't Tell, then you may create an Image Pickin' topic to suggest a better one.

The translation projects that do exist have a lot of work to do and must keep up with the English-language pages.

Not sure what to make of all images being textless.

EDIT: To clarify, this is in response to the original post, not the post directly above this one.

Edited by Brainulator9 on Jun 16th 2019 at 3:11:23 PM

Again, don't put words in our mouths. Broadly speaking, images should not rely on text to convey their point, but this is not always possible.

The images with text in them tend to be an important part of illustrating the trope, otherwise it would be distracting or Just a Face and a Caption. There is literally no other way to visualize a trope like "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer.

Edited by KJMackley on Jun 16th 2019 at 6:36:15 AM

I don't know what the point of that tangent about Wikipedia was, but using a Cracked article of all things as some sort of "gotcha!" really isn't the best idea.

If you read the top comment on that article, you'll see that it had some Manipulative Editing to make Wikipedia's situation more dire than it really is.

If I can use Baidu Translate to ask strangers for directions in Suzhou and find where it is I'm going, I'm pretty sure others can use similar apps to adequately get the gist of what an article about fiction is saying.

Translation apps are getting better, and it stands to reason they'll only continue to get better over time.

And those better apps can't be used for images, because...? I know it's a bit harder, but if someone is that interested in knowing what the image says, I'm sure they're willing to take the 2 minutes.

Exactly. Look, I know Wikipedia might not be perfect, but many studies have shown it's still fairly reliable - certainly not the hellhole of vandalism it is in the public mind. I hate when people propagate that stereotype.

Back on topic, we try to have images not depend on text, but not all tropes are purely visual. Like how would you illustrate a dialogue trope in a picture with no text? And if people can't understand the English text in an image, why are they reading an English-language article? The effort for foreign-language versions on TV Tropes is being worked on, but it still needs to make a lot of progress. By the way, the non-English Wikipedias are written by people fluent in their respective languages, not by putting the English versions through Google Translate (which, while it doesn't produce complete nonsense every time like all the memes say, is no substitute for actually knowing the language).

Edited by Lymantria on Jun 16th 2019 at 7:10:50 AM

I try to stay neutral whenever I can, but this is one of the most nonsensical proposals I've seen in here in a long time. We have tons of dialogue-related tropes that can't be illustrated without actually depicting people, you know, talking, and since this is the English version of the wiki, it's pretty evident that we need to have pics with English dialogue in them. Plus, we've been doing this for how many years now, and this all of a sudden is a hot topic?

I'm 100% in agreement with Wilbyr here.

Well, here's another option to keep in mind.

For cases where there does wind up being dialogue in a page image, why not include label-note, within the captions of such images, such that those who click on it can see a summary of the dialogue in the page image for quick and easy translation purposes?

Again, we must question why someone who can't read English would be reading the English-language version of the site at all.

Im truly flabbergasted at why we would need to avoid words in images despite the fact that this is an english speaking wiki.

Didn't this thread die last month? Why are we talking about this again?